Epitaph

On the final day of the residency, there was a small closing event. Some friends and family (not mine) attended and some gallery patrons returned.

I wavered over the fate of Box People until ten minutes before closing, and then started to snip threads.

A gallery staff member appeared and asked me not to take the work down until after closing. He disappeared before I could explain that taking the work down and destroying it in public was a crucial part of the whole three week performance.  I had a little think about the consequences of disobedience, using my standard process - question to self: will I be fined, imprisoned or beheaded? if answer is no, then proceed.

We proceeded.  The invisible tape had become one with the parquet-esque lino.  A woman with red black chipped nail polish explained how she'd quit biting her nails and now they were hard as. Nails. She helped get the stuff off.  I forgot to breathe for a few seconds as I watched motorcycle boots and thongs grind my paper flowers flat. 

"So what was it all about, then?" asked the guy with the boots.

"Birth, deaths, love, booze, crime, travel. The usual," I replied.

"Some stories are not meant to be told, ay." He smiled.  And ground up more flowers.

Seconds before the last bit of manuscript was stuffed into a bin bag, a council officer came rushing over.

"Oh no," she said. "I wanted some of those for the library."

We paused for a second, and then continued to clean up. 

I wanted to apologise to the officer then, and I apologise now.  I couldn't at the time.  I  was too busy choking on the unspeakable irony.

NOVEL ATTEMPT ON LIFE

 

1. Attempt on Life

After a week in the gallery, drafting and illustrating, there was a moment when all the text seemed to slide off the pages of the manuscript in front of me.   Box People , the novel I've been living with for 15 years, was erasing itself.  Time to give up, split up, bail out.  Kill the thing. 

2.Manuscript

I had the familiar urge to scrumple the papers into 250 balls, but I refined this into making paper aeroplanes. With the help of invisible tape, the planes became flowers.  I folded until my wrist burned, the skin peeled off my left thumb and I got bored.

3.More Manuscript

I put the rest of the manuscript on a chair.  Where my bum should be.    

4.Disposal Chair

I got a better chair.  This may have been a mistake. Now I have two chairs and I have to sit on one.  Which means getting back to writing.

5.Hooks

Not enough in my narrative so far, so I added a few.

6. Fishing line

Tension, suspense, threads.  And they shine so pleasingly under gallery spotlights.

7.Guests (not pictured)

People visit.  They smile at the flowers.  I show them what's left of my first novel and they laugh sadly.  At first I tell them that they're looking at the death of a novel, but they get upset. Friends and complete strangers lobby for the death penalty to be revoked.  I am touched by their concern for a piece of writing that they have never met, and that may in fact be rotten to the core. They suggest a life sentence on a USB in a far away place, rehabilitation in the form of poetry or short stories, or community service as a youth arts project.  The jury is still out.

 

story so far

Tomato Wax

Monster and hound, our jagged shadows are thrown up twelve feet tall in front of us.  I stand aside, flat against the walls of the shed.  The dog sits. We both watch the Benz as it slips up next to us, waiting for the tinted windows to slide down, hoping for a door to open.  Red tail lights, the last traces of the demon, shrink away.

 

It’s Friday night, and I can hear Otosan in the bath.  He’s spent the past four nights in the company dorm in Tokyo, eating company food.  Okasan is preparing a big dinner, because she’s a married woman again.  When Otosan comes to the table, he brings tomatoes picked from the garden.  He holds one out to me, bringing another one to his nose and drawing in the scent of summer and home.  I smell it too, and hand the fruit back. He passes the globes up to his wife to slice.  She has pounded  tororo in a bowl with serrated sides, and mixed it with a warm soy soup.  She serves it in rounded wooden bowls, with rice , and seaweed flakes on top.  Tororo has to go straight into your mouth.  Miss, and it burns your skin.  I love it.  I accept a second helping.

 

Strange stranger, says Otosan, in Japanese, and he presses me into a little more beer.  He can’t drink.  Not until his stomach heals.  There was cancer there, not long ago.

 

He used to be very fat, says Okasan.

Pig fat, says Otosan, looking at his wife.

And a big heavy drinker.  My husband is a big heavy drinker and my son is a big heavy drinker.

I’m a big heavy drinker, I say.

Okasan pours out green tea.

 

At seven thirty the door bell starts ringing.  It’s not a button on the outside of the house, it’s a little cast iron bell that hangs from the door handle and rings when the door is open.  It lets you know that someone has come into the genkan, or left the genkan.  Each time it rings, it sends out a prayer.  One, two, three, four, five schoolgirls pile inside and scuff off their shoes. Otosan keeps his eyes on the TV.  We troop upstairs to my bedroom.  Evening classes begin.

 

She is sorry but she has come to class in school uniform because she has been practising basketball and has not had time to change.

They got new seats in class today, and it was good.

She has long brown hair and a small round face and big round eyes.

There was an English test. It was not good.

She smiles, eager to please.

There was a long grey hair on top of the rice in her obento.

She’s wearing a brand new shirt that says Too drunk to fuck

There was a sports festival and she ran, five hundred metres.

Her hair is fresh out of rollers.

 

My students seem clean.  Narrow. Uncomplicated. Precious. Who am I to be teaching them?

 

That night, I dream.  Okasan is on stage in an evening dress, singing an aria while a dashing young man accompanies her on piano.  They are on a world tour.  London, New York, Paris.  They go everywhere together, and he brings her roses, but they are just friends. Otosan is stuck up on the north island, with a lot of men in underwear. They throw buckets of melted wax at each other, then buckets of iced water. As the wax sets into stalactites, a TV crew sets the men up on a three tiered wedding cake and then throws more wax at them.  Dripping, coated, iced, they become one huge white monument.  A thick flannel corset has clamped itself over my nightgown and two brown plaits are snaking down to my waist.  I’m in a draper’s shop with dark wood counters, wires that carry change and high shelves stuffed with rolls and rolls of cloth.  More corsets are suspended from the ceiling and pinned around the walls.  A padded chair stands on a counter, and I climb into it, holding tight to its arms as it winches itself up towards the beams above.  There I sit, bent double and cradled in the small space between chair and ceiling.  Two ball bearings roll down my cheeks, hit the boards below and clatter away towards a door where daylight blazes. 

grid

You were a funny kid when I met you, the woman tells the doorman.  Just a skinny kid standing on a corner in Fitzroy with a potato in your pocket.

 

The doorman tells me that he liked the way the potato rested, round and smooth in his palm, palm inside his hand, hand inside his jacket.  His letter is tucked into my waistband now, a little something to hang on to as I stand alone at bus stops, in other people’s bedrooms, on cold railway platforms, under fluorescent tubes in strange offices.  Waiting.

 

Not that I’m doing much of that right now.  Okasan keeps me busy and she must take care of me. We have talked about what might happen if I caught a train.

 

If I get lost I’ll say Where am I?  Where is this train?

 

Where am I? Interesting question. Do you lose yourself?  And your train too? You know where you are.  You are here.  What you must ask is Koko wa doko desu ka? Where is this place?

 

Where is this place? There is a cage at the side of the house, in front of Otosan’s little garden shed.  The dog sees me coming and he howls in a Japanese way.

 

Wan Wan Wan

 

He’s crying out the loneliness of an animal that is well loved, and fed and kept.  The cage stinks of moulted fur and crapped out biscuits.  Only one dog, in his cage.  Only one me, in this place. This afternoon, week three, day five, we are both allowed out. 

He stretches up onto his hind legs and places his paws on a horizontal bar.  I have to clip his lead on before I open the door, or he will escape.  I make sure the collar is tight around his throat. 

 

As huskies must, he runs. The road is just wide enough for one car (if it isn’t American) and the rice fields come right up to its verges.  The dog drags the lead out tight and urinates at the end of the vectors; left and right, left and right.  We charge over the Numazu Sen and turn south, past the noodle shop, the hairdresser, the garage.  I can’t read the characters on their signs, but I read the cracking, rusting concrete, the sticky dusty windows, the way the paint peels, the smell of cooking oil and exhaust fumes, the streaming sound of cars in afternoon flood.

 

A man driving a yellow forklift stops halfway across the pavement and we edge past his smooth metal prongs.  Two women gossip at a gate, stop for a moment as we pass, start up again.  I can hear my name behind me…gaijin. An obasan, bent double and humped, pushes her trolley up towards the supermarket.  The carrying bit is low and squarish, with a cushion on top, so she can sit down when she needs to.  It looks a bit like a pushchair.  A little girl walks beside her.  The dog lunges at her little white socks and slip on shoes and I struggle to hold him back.

 

Sumimassen, sumimassen, sumimassen. Apologising and apologising.  The girl cries, the old woman stands very still and I drag the dog away, his lead burning my palms.

 

At the edge of the rice field grid, between the highway and the bullet train line, the water in the river is a murky, pale blue. Puddled ceramic glaze.  Eyes filmed over with cataracts.  Lashed with rank grass.  Fringed with shredded garbage.  Concrete crosses lie, at intervals, along the river bed.  To our left, vegetable gardens tumble with green patches, tea bushes, squat trees, a hat on a pole, bound stakes.  The soil looks rich, under the bleached weeds. Pieces of fluttering black plastic are raised on sticks, funeral flags to scare off birds.  I’m not scared.  I look up at the sun as it fades and falls, past the horizon strung with wires, and I am happy in this place.

 

Walking a dog on the grid is a bit like messing with a game of  pac man.  There are big dogs and little dogs, hunters and food.  I have to look well ahead and plot 90 degree turns to dodge fights.  People wave at each other from a distance, then run in opposite directions.  It is best, says Junko, not to get too close to your neighbours.

 

We walk and walk and walk until there are only one or two walkers left, then we turn down a track, too early, and it peters away to a dirt path that carries us through a clump of high yellow weeds.  Rained on toilet paper and tissues are draped and moulded over the stalks.  The ground is matted and boggy under my feet. The dog stops to eat ants. By now, the evening light is hanging like gauze over the scenery. Yellow gold rice straw bundles, growth shooting green out of the mud, low piles of husks burnt to shifting dunes and air brushed into black and white and grey.

 

I should turn left, but I turn right. The dog gets edgier, scenting a trail of unfamiliar smells.  The steep fenced bank below the bullet train track reaches up on one side, and a large shed walls us in on the other side.  Danger. It would have been proper to walk the dog the way Otosan does it, in a neat, brisk, repeated square.  I’ve pulled the circuit into a rectangle.  Too far south, too far north.  Too late in the day. Headlights rise up behind us. Two blinding yellow eyes in a black face.  Mercedes Benz.

Sentakumono

I’m sleeping on the bottom of a bunk bed, under this pile of boxes. I will get braver, later, and dig into the boxes, and find another girl’s dolls and stacks of love comics from the 80’s. Okasan is hammering on the bedroom door.

 

Good Morning, Good Morning.  Come here please.  Now.  Do you see Mt Fuji?

 

I get up, pull on clothes, and follow her out across the Astroturf. Together, we lean and twist out over the aluminium railings.   In winter, when the mountain is white, she will ask her friends from Shizuoka to come and look.  They have good houses, but they don’t have this.

 

I’ve been here two weeks, breathing under  blanket grey sky, sweating like the town chimneys (red white striped one for every day of the year), swallowing the heat and haze that hid the mountain.  Everything seemed melted, rock spirited away by shadowy vapours.  Now the sun is tired and the wind is more restless than it was,  the volcano is getting back its substance.

 

It bores me to write about what comes next. I’m not bored at the time, but it’s a lock down stage.  I am under complete control.  I am fed, I sleep, I sweat out surreal dreams, follow the routines in this house, in this place that so badly wants to take me in.  And I so badly want to be taken in.

 

Fujiko gets up at 5.30am to start cooking asa gohan and obento.  The rice is done overnight in the timed cooker, but miso soup must be made fresh.  There is fish to be fried.  The lunchbox must hold a selection of meats and vegetables, cooked separately and arranged attractively next to the rice, then left to cool for at least half an hour, to stop the whole thing stewing in its Tupperware.  I am eating the things left over from the obento.  I can use  chopsticks, but Fujiko is not pleased with the way I hold my fingers.  She rearranges them and this makes me fumble and drop my food.

 

It is better, she says, to struggle and try to do the right thing than it is to be comfortable in the wrong way.  This is a saying.  A kotowasa.  I hear a lot of these things.  They fall into me like boulders,  each to be taken very seriously. It’s part of the decision.

 

 

Before Fujiko serves rice from the steamer she holds up a bowl.

 

Kore wa nan desu ka? she asks.

 

Cha wan desu. I say.

 

When she heard I was coming, she says, she went to the cha wan shop and she chose this specially for me.  Pink, white, green, floral, girly. Not me.  Me now.

She points to the soy bottle.

 

Shoyu desu.

 

Coppu.  Sara.  Osara. Hashi.  Not words or text.  Sounds and things.  Two weeks in this place, and I am two weeks old.

 

She serves me cold tofu with spring onions and dry fish flakes.

 

Your eyes are not open.  Please eat this cold food.

 

I wake up.

 

Long metal washing poles are set on stands along the edges of the roof,  skirts and shirts and trousers are threaded and pegged neatly along them.  Plastic hangers are clipped to the poles, dangling socks and underpants and towels.  They flap.  We tug the clothes when they are wet, to remove the creases.  We hang them inside out, to slow fading.  Today is fine, so the futons are draped out on the balcony rails, to make them fresh.  They must come in before the sun goes down.  Like me.  It will be good to fall into the quilts, truly tired, smelling sunshine.

 

Later, I drag the futons into the house and fold them up in their respective bedrooms.  The clothes go into a heap in onichan’s room, where I kneel on his tatami mats, facing the Numazu highway, Fuji San behind me.  Afternoon light flows through the sliding glass doors.  Shoulders together, torsos folded, crotches up, hips tucked, legs creased, ankles rolled.  Only a dead man wears unfolded clothes.  Otosan wears long legged underwear and his business whysutsu are left out for the iron.  His sons wear silky boxer shorts.  Fujiko has rubberised girdles and her cotton underpants seem incredibly small.  The laundry is now ordered into pleasing piles, according to wearer. I feel something like love as I’m putting the clean towels on the little shelf outside the bathroom.

 

It surprises me that I’m pleased.  I’m a drop and shop girl. My routine is to wear stuff until the stink manages to overcome my Marlboro blasted senses, or until the outfit falls apart.  Then I throw it in a heap to marinate for a few months.  In the meantime, I buy more two-dollar dresses from the charity shop and the cycle continues, until the marinated objects are mysteriously clean again or their deconstructed status says something I want to say. 

 

Back in my room, and sitting at ease in the space after house work, I take the letter out of my pocket, unfold it, and read it again.  When the doorman was nineteen, he climbed this volcano, saw the sunrise and looked down on this place.  His body has travelled the Tokaido Sen.

prologue

Look.  I don’t know what the date is.  I’m guessing must be 94.  About six in the morning.  Melbourne. Late winter dark orange wet light on the bluestone drains. I’m leaving.

 

The cabbie has pulled over. I’m apologising and…

 

Look. I’m sorry to do this to you in the very first paragraph of a novel that is really sweet, resonant and aesthetically pretty damn gorgeous. How can I say this nicely?  I’ll start again.

 

I say:

I’m sorry.  It’s just that it was my last night at work and I had a few knock offs and…

 

But that would be lying.  It wasn’t just a few drinks, it was a couple of buckets of vodka lime and soda and a posse of cock sucking cowboys and a mulled up pill. Mulled up.  Oh please.  After all the time I’ve done in clubs. And from The Whippet of all people. 

 

It seems like a really good idea to go to East Melbourne for a smoke, but I get a look at Sam’s little lace up Mollini platforms kicked off on the rented carpet.  I know then that the doorman has been flicking her ankles up around her little ears.  She’s little, really little, so  little she’s big.  The biggest little door bitch in town. The promoters must think kicky punchy young virtual midgets are a good look. The doorman would have had her keep those shoes on, and he’d have gripped the curving great (little) hourglass heels in his big hands and stared at a spot on the wall above her head as he drove her home.  When he says he’s driving a girl home, it’s hammers and nails.  He’s been doing a bit of woodwork on me. Wrapping my ankles around my ears. Hanging onto my Mollini platforms too. Same shoe, five sizes bigger.

 

I know I’m leaving and  I know what I have with the doorman is just the world’s longest running one-night stand but I’m riled up, and the love drug seeping through my system is starting to sour. We’re in the kitchen.  They’re poring over a 24hr pizza menu, I’m in the fridge.

 

Ahhhh. 

 

The doorman has stashed a six pack of Beck’s in there. He never keeps beer at my place.  I can feel myself slipping and sliding down the harem hierarchy.  Maybe it’s nothing personal.  Maybe it’s because she’s a smoker and I’m a drinker, and he’s too smart to leave beers with me. I look up over the fridge door and see those bloody Mollini’s in the hallway. Right then and there I decide I’m going to take responsibility for the fatherless bottles chilling and glowing in front of me.  Time to swipe them, swipe the shoes, set myself up in the lav and decant the beer into those size fours. It pisses out through the eyelets where the laces have loosened and I am well pleased.  Then there’s a bath and somebody has really really beautiful skin and, whoops, Hawaiian all over the shop. Bad call at the end of a string of bad calls. Call cab.

 

 I hold tight to the back seat, and the cab, and the earth as it turns, and every star in the galaxy draws a white line across the back of my eyelids. As we swing around under the train tracks I remember the way the doorman drives. That same bend, me, the whole damn town, knocked off in one smooth reflex move.

 

…So I had a few knock offs and.  Got a bit carried away. Thanks for that. I’ll be right now.  Just open the window a bit.  Where?  Japan. I’m going to Japan. Nope.  Don’t speak a word. Nope.  Got thirty bucks to my name.  But I know people there…Here.  Turn right here.  Down this alley thanks.

 

The cab pulls in round the back of Pete’s. I wouldn’t normally let a driver get this close to home but hey.  I’m leaving.

 

Got any good advice?

 

Well darl, I can tell you one thing for sure.

 

Every cabbie can do that.

 

I say:

Yeah?

 

Tell ya one thing for free.  You’ll either love it or hate it.

 

That’s the moment.  The door is open, small change rolls, a white feather escapes my boa and floats floats floats above the water and down to the flat surface of the shining sea that is the puddle under my nose.  It’s not six in the morning.  It’s six at night. It’s the moment when I decide.